text: Taube's initial research at Cornell University focused on the same areas he studied as a graduate student, oxidizing agents containing oxygen and halogens, and redox reactions  featuring these species.  He used isotopically labeled oxygen-18 and radioactive chlorine to study these reactions.  He was recognized by the American Chemical Society in 1955 for his isotope studies.
  Taubes interest in coordination chemistry was sparked when he was chosen to develop a course on advanced inorganic chemistry while at the University of Chicago.  He was unable to find much information in the textbooks available at the time.  Taube realized that his work on the substitution of carbon in organic reactions could be related to inorganic complexes.  In 1952, Taube published a key paper relating the rates of chemical reactions to electronic structure in Chemical Reviews.  This research was the first to recognize the correlation between the rate of ligand substitution and the d-electron configuration of the metal.  Taubes key discovery was the way molecules build a type of "chemical bridge" rather than simply exchanging electrons, as previously thought.  Identifying this intermediate step explained why reactions between similar metals and ions occurred at different rates.  His paper in Chemical Reviews was developed while on sabbatical in the late 1940s.  An article in Science called this paper "one of the true classics in inorganic chemistry" after his Nobel Prize was announced.  Taube researched ruthenium and osmium, both elements have a high capacity for back bonding.  This type of electron donation was key when studying the way electrons are transferred between molecules in a chemical reaction.
  When looking back on his research, Taube explained that he sometimes had difficulty finding graduate students willing to work on electron transfer reactions, as they preferred to work on more "exciting" projects in his laboratory focusing on the effects of isotopic tracers and kinetics.  Taube felt that a "primary flaw" with his correlation between electron configuration and ligand substitution was that it was described mainly in terms of valence bond theory, as crystal field theory and ligand field theory were not well established when he published his work in 1952.